Media & Public Relations

Noted scholar, activist to visit Binghamton University

2004-02-18

Angela Davis, teacher, writer, scholar and activist will visit the Binghamton University campus on Saturday, February 28, to help the Black Student Union (BSU) celebrate Black History month. Davis is scheduled to speak at 6 p.m. in Lecture Hall 1 on the campus. The presentation is free and open to the public.

Davis’ political activism began as a youth in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1969 she came to national attention after being removed from her teaching position at UCLA as a result of her social activism and her membership in the Communist Party.

In 1970, Davis was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List and was the subject of an intense police search that drove her underground, culminating in one of the most famous trials in recent history. A massive international “Free Angela Davis” campaign led to her acquittal in 1972. Harnessing the momentum of that campaign, she co-founded the National Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression.

Davis’ articles and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she is an author of five books, including Angela Davis: An Autobiography; Women, Race & Class; and the recently published Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday.

Davis has lectured in all 50 states, as well as in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and the former Soviet Union. She is a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis has also held the distinguished honor of an appointment to the University of California Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies.